The Best Australian Essays 2015 by Geordie Williamson Page A

the dormitory-style rooms of the buildings. Within a couple of months, as the survivors regained their health, clusters of these squares became the separate camps that housed the Jewish and gentile DPs. Both were predominantly Polish nationals, and one of the initial sticking points was the British government’s refusal to recognise the distinct cultural and racial identity of the Jews. Eventually, after the Christian Poles were evacuated either to their homeland or to other assembly centres, this camp became a self-governing Jewish community. With a shifting population of up to 12,000 men, women and children, it formed the largest Jewish centre in Germany until the disbandment of the camp in 1950.
    The hundred or so residential buildings were by no means the sum total of the camp. One of the few pieces of good fortune in the Belsen story was the fact that this kaserne began as a state-of-the-art facility for the Reich’s soldiers, who were provided with a cinema, a concert hall and an air-conditioned tent-theatre that seated 5000. For the DPs, these became important community meeting places. Yet it is when I am taken to the building known as the Round House – formerly the mess for the German army officers – that my eyes really pop out. A framed photograph shows this building in 1936 with a large ornamental lake in front; that is now gone, but the façade is intact. So is the enormous dining room, with its crystal chandeliers. Empty now, but it is easy to imagine it in the heyday of the Reich, with the uniformed officers feasting and carousing; less easy to imagine it when the Round House was an outpost of the emergency hospital and this room alone held 300 beds in which the starving victims of the Third Reich were fed the thin gruel that was all their depleted metabolisms were able to digest. By July 1945, it was an isolation ward for patients with incurable tuberculosis. A month later, when my father arrived at the camp, most of the TB cases had been evacuated to Sweden and the remainder had been sent to the part of the barracks that had once been a lazaret or military hospital, and which had been renamed the ‘Glyn Hughes Hospital’ in honour of the brigadier who had developed the plan for the medical relief of Belsen.
    In the extraordinary little private museum that a retired British soldier has set up in the cellars of the Round House, I see photographs of this hospital, but when I ask to be taken there I am told that vandals recently got into the building and caused such damage that it is now too dangerous to enter. Given the difficulty that was the mark of the relationship between my father and myself, this barrier against going to the place where he actually lived and worked seems fitting. Yet as my journey has brought me so far, I push a bit and my kindly guide agrees that we can at least look at the hospital from the gate. Getting there involves a ten-minute drive around the back of the military facility, and then along a country road to a deserted area of woodland. (Now I understand how the vandals weren’t spotted.) By the time I stand at the entrance to the old lazaret , the autumn evening is drawing in and the photograph I take of the towered building at the end of the avenue of leafless trees has the palette and atmosphere of a scene from a Cold War spy movie.
    Yet this appearance is deceptive. I have allowed the past to lull me into anachronism. As I unravel more of the history of the Belsen Displaced Persons Camp, I find myself in a story that is as contemporary as the latest failed peace talk in the Middle East, or breaking news about the conflict over the borders of the Soviet Union.
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    It is springtime when I return to the deserted hospital. The sky is blue and the branches of the trees lining the roadway down to the main building are now clothed with leaves of an almost fizzy shade of green that we don’t have in the Australian bush. This vibrant rebirth of nature seems